


So Be With Me

by Slytherin_Princess_Nysa



Series: GoT season 8 alternatives [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate 8x04, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gendrya - Freeform, Happy Ending, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I’m in denial about the series final, Love, POV Gendry, Romance, so it doesn’t exist in this house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-08 12:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18894211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slytherin_Princess_Nysa/pseuds/Slytherin_Princess_Nysa
Summary: The Battle of Winterfell is over.The dead are defeated and he has survived the longest night of his life. He stands, bloodied and bruised and covered in guts, but still standing. He frantically searches through the faces of the living and the dead, looking for a grey eyed girl. It's all he cares about, finding Arya.A little angst and a lot of happy endings.





	So Be With Me

**Author's Note:**

> Highly recommend listening to ‘Freya Ridings - Lost Without You’, it’s literally the perfect song for Gendry and Arya

The battle is over, the dead have been defeated.

He stood surrounded by rotting corpses, his hammer bloodied and his body covered in guts and chunks of bone. Gendry felt a hand slam into his shoulder and he twisted on instinct, raising the hammer in an arch, ready to take the final swing, before he recognizes Tormund’s gashed and dirtied face. He lowered his weapon, the steel handle slipped through his hands and falling at his feet, and gripped onto Tormund's arm for balance.

His body hurts worse than he could ever remember and he could feel warm blood dripping from his head and into his eyes. But it didn’t matter because no matter how much he searched for her, he couldn’t find Arya in the courtyard or along the wall where he had last seen her after their retreat. And he couldn’t breathe as his eyes moved quickly among the living soldiers milling around, searching for life, but he couldn’t find her and he refused to look towards the sea of bodies on the ground.

When he was on the front lines, all he thought about was her. Her steel coloured eyes, her callused hands, her rare but absolutely beautiful smile, her soft lips pressed against his.

He looked for her short body, he expected to see her covered in blood that wasn’t hers like they all were. He wanted to see her run through the courtyard with the weapon he had made her held in her hands. Safe and alive.

Tormund’s grip tightened almost painfully, perhaps if Gendry’s body wasn’t covered in bruises and cuts and blood, he would feel the grasp more.

"Arya?!" his voice is scratched and he can barely recognize it. "Arya!"

But there was no answer, the living aren’t even phased by his screams as they continue digging through bodies and rubble.

Gendry could see mouths moving, people yelling, shouting the names of people they knew but couldn’t find. Tormund was saying something but it sounded like it was coming from the other side of a deep tunnel, distorted. Gendry couldn’t hear anything, all the noise around him was a depthless buzz in his ears.

Tormund’s hand dropped, leaving his shoulder cold and empty. Gendry ripped himself away from Tormund and stumbled off the pile of bodies under his feet. He was unsteady, battleworn and exhausted but he couldn’t rest. Not yet, not until he found the wild girl with grey eyes. His head spun and he twisted, his eyes reluctantly dropping to the bloodied ground, he prayed to whatever gods were still watching over that he wouldn’t see her.

“Arya!” he screamed in panic when he saw the broken spear sticking out of the chest of a dead man. It was her spear, he had made it, he knew it by heart.

Then he saw it. The small body laying unmoving in the unrelenting hand of a giant. Dark brown hair whipped across her face, legs tucked under her. Gendry’s knees gave out and he dropped into the mud. Distantly he felt hot tears sliding through the filth on his face, blurring his vision even more than the dark.

She couldn’t be gone. She just couldn’t.

“Gendry! Lad, look at me!” a kind voice called into his ear but Gendry shook his head, eyes staying on the body covered by the dead and darkness alike.

He couldn’t understand.

Why would he, a lowly bastard who mattered to no one but her, survive while she was dead. Arya was brave, she was resilient, she was strong, she was brilliant, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And she was _dead_. She was dead and his heart was rotting away in his chest when he thought of a world without her in it.

“No, no,” Gendry heard more voices and felt hands pulling at him. “Arya!”

His chest felt like it was weighed down by the whole of Winterfell and every soul inside, he should have protected her. It should have been him laying on the ground, unbreathing and lost in the sea of dead covering her home. Arya should be alive.

Gendry would deliver the world to the doors of death just to be back with Arya. Back in their perfect eye of the storm, laying on the rough sacks with her warm body pressed against his and her surprisingly soft lips moulding to his. He would give anything to be back in that moment with her, he just wanted Arya in his arms.

His chest felt empty, like his own warhammer had been used to hit him over and over again until his ribs were shattered and his heart was crushed and his lungs were pierced by shards of bone. But that wasn’t enough to describe the pain he felt when he thought of her laying on the ground, dead. He should have forced her into the crypts, tied her up inside if he had to. Arya would have hated him for it but she would have been alive to hate him.

When they had been separated years before, he was certain that he would never get to see her again. That she was dead, or that he would die at the hands of the Red Woman before he could see her again. Gendry had escaped from Dragonstone, but then Arya was dead and he was alone. Before she had been his best friend, the only person who cared for him and who he cared for. Now, she was _Arya_ \- the girl who made him smile in a world filled with dead men, the girl who took his breath away, the girl he loves more than anything else.

“Gendry,” he heard Davos’ voice mixed with anguished sobs in the courtyard. “Come on, get up, lad. All the injured are being taken to the great hall, you need to get looked at.”

Gendry felt his body shaking, his fingers reached up and dug into Davos’ hand. “No, she’s gone, Davos. She’s gone. I couldn’t save her.”

“We all lost someone tonight, but you’re still alive. So you need to get up now because I’m not about to watch you bleed out here.” Davos waved someone down and Gendry felt large hands wrap around his chest and lift him up.

A sharp pain travelling over his thigh and he glanced down at the jagged knife sticking out of his leg. He hadn’t even noticed it there and he felt the pressure lift as Tormund and Davos wrapped his arms over their necks, turning him towards the doors of the keep.

There were women running between the injured, carrying baskets of torn up white linens and pails of clean water. The Maester was looking at the more severely wounded while Lady Sansa pointed the people from the crypts towards people who needed help.

Gendry could never see the similarities between Arya and her sister. Lady Sansa was red haired and blue eyed, she was gentle and enjoyed dresses and complicated braids. Arya was a warrior, she was a fighter, she was… Gendry shook his head. Looking at Lady Sansa, for the first time, he could see her resemblance to Arya. It was in the way she commanded the room, the way she walked through bloodied man and remained calm and collected.

Gendry didn’t know how the world could keep turning without Arya in it. How her sister could smile kindly as she handed injured men wine, he didn’t know. Where was Jon? Was he laying on the field dead next to his little sister?

Davos and Tormund dropped him on a bench and the pain flared on his leg. Lady Sansa appeared in his vision, she was ordering one of the women to tend to his injuries but he couldn’t hear over the wails of other men. He reached for Lady Sansa, he couldn’t feel shame at the blood and grime transferring to her sleeve, and she turned to look at him.

“I’m sorry, my lady.” his voice was barely a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

Lady Sansa knelt gently by his side, Davos sat next to Gendry and Tormund was standing beside Lady Sansa. All of them staring at him, Lady Sansa glanced between the two other men before she turned back towards him. “What are you sorry for? You’ve done your duty, you fought for the living and we are victorious.”

“We may be alive and the dead may be gone,” Gendry looked at her, blue eyes staring back at him, not grey. “ But it’s not a victory without her, My Lady.”

“Without her?” Lady Sansa asked, but when he didn’t answer, she looked past his head at Davos for an explanation.

But Davos never had a chance to reply. The doors creaked open and the hall fell silent, the only sound was the turning of wooden wheels as Bran was pushed into the room by Jon. Lady Sansa gave him one last look of sympathy before she moved to her brothers. Gendry watched them, feeling the hole in his chest grow, Jon embraced his sister and patted Bran’s shoulder, twisting to pull someone from behind him.

A girl came forward and Gendry thought he had to be dead. Surely, he had bled out from his wounds and Arya had come to lead him into the afterlife.

She was disheveled- hair yanked out of its bun, blood running down her face, and a dark stain covering her shoulder- and exhausted, her legs and arms shaking as she tried to stand. Jon was keeping her standing and Lady Sansa pushed her tangled haired out of her grey eyes to study the deep cut on her head. Gendry couldn’t remember seeing someone so beautiful.

Bran calmly nodded towards Arya and said something towards Jon and Lady Sansa. The Lady of Winterfell turned to Arya, her mouth open in shock as she reached to grasp her sisters shoulders in her hands. Arya looked up at her sister and Gendry felt himself breathe for the first time since the battle started.

Her steel eyes roamed around the hall, counting the wounded before they finally fell on him. Gendry felt his fingers dig into the wood of the bench underneath him as he tried to stop himself from standing too fast. He slowly began to lift himself up, his eyes staying on Arya, afraid that if he looked away she would disappear and the light would go out again.

Gendry was barely standing before the knife in his thigh burned as his muscles stretched and he fell back into the seat besides an anxious Davos. Tormund held him down by his shoulders as he tried to stand up again.

Then Arya was pushing past her siblings and moving as quickly as her legs would let her. She dropped to her knees in front of him, her gloveless hands wrapping around his. Arya was a highborn, the sister of two Northern kings and a natural-born warrior, and she was kneeling at the feet of a bastard from Flea Bottom.

“Gendry?” her voice was like spun sugar in his ears. “Are you okay?”

“Arya.” he reached out tentatively, his hands shaking as he touched her face. Gendry was afraid that she would turn to smoke and bleed through his fingers if he moved too fast. His fingers found her dirtied face and he slowly brushed knotted hair away. “Arya?”

She was smiling at him and Gendry could swear that she was surrounded by golden light. Arya reached up to touch his face, gentle fingers gliding over his cuts and bruises like she could heal him with just her touch.

“By the gods, there’s a knife in your leg!” Arya pulled away from his hands and bent to study his leg. Feeling her slip between his fingers, even if she didn’t move too far away, left a gnawing panic in his chest. “Has anyone looked at this?”

“Not yet, My Lady,” for once, Arya didn’t snap at being called by her title. Just nodded at Davos in thanks and turned to call for help. Her fingers stayed on his knee as Arya turned, eyes searching for someone who could help him, she waved down the Maester when she saw him.

The elderly man hurried at the order of Lady Stark and, for the first time, Gendry realized what Arya would be like if she were really a Lady. She already had respect, but now she commanded it. The Maester dropped next to her, examining his leg.

“It hasn’t pierced any vital arteries, but when I take the knife out, the bleeding will be quick and I will need to suture the wound shut immediately.” Arya’s hand tightened as the Maester continued to speak. He could tell she was nervous for him and he couldn’t stop his shaking fingers from carding through the loose strands of hair, calming her.

“Arya?” Lady Sansa called gently behind her, Jon pushing Bran towards them. “You should sit down, your head is bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” Arya didn’t look away from him, her hand reaching out to smooth the lines in his face. “It’s just a scratch.”

“You should have it looked at, love.” Gendry whispered, his thumb pausing above her eyebrow. “It could get infected.

Arya squeezed his hand and pulled it away from her head, “You have a knife sticking out of your leg, you aren’t allowed to speak.”

“Arya?” Jon asked, walking forward to nudge her shoulder with his hand. Gendry could see the silent question there- asking how she knew him, why she was letting his grime covered hands on her, why he was allowed to call her love.

Suddenly there was a sharp yank and Gendry’s head whipped back with a scream. The Maester pressed a wad of linen into his gushing wound. Gendry felt Davos and Tormund pin his flailing arms down and Arya held down his legs. The blood soaked through the fabric of his trousers and dripped down, pooling under his feet.

The Maester cut away his pants, flipping open the healers bag at his feet and pulling out a long needle and thick thread. Gendry eyed the steady hands of the Maester as he yanked the thread through the needle. He groaned when more pressure was applied to the stab wound. His eyes watered and he felt Arya lift up and sit on his good leg. Her arms wrapped around his neck and she buried her face in his shoulder.

“It’s okay, everything is going to be okay.” Arya shushed him when he bit back a scream of pain. “Just take deep breaths and hold onto me. I’m here.”

He wrestled his arm away from Davos, wrapping it around Arya and holding her close. He breathed in her scent. Beneath the layers of death and blood and sweat, there was Arya. She smelled like his forge- like the hardiness of melted steel, like him, the sweet coolness of snow, the burning heat of the fire.

Gendry felt the bite of the needle and he felt like a wounded animal, whimpering pathetically into Arya’s shoulder. His fingers dug into her leather jerkin and she was pulled so tightly to his chest, he felt like she could disappear into his side. The burning of his leg continued but Arya’s soft whispers pushed a wave of serenity over him.

He felt the needle knot and be cut away from his let and he squeezed Arya. A few drops of liquid fire poured into his wound and Gendry roared. Arya pulled away from his shoulder and growled, “What the hell is that?”

“To keep it from infection, My Lady.” The Maester held up a glass bottle with am swishing amber liquid inside.

“Perhaps you can do it all at once, quick and less painful.” Lady Sansa suggested and Gendry took notice of Arya’s siblings, only Jon and Lady Sansa now, both watching them with varying degrees of shock and concern.

Gendry knew their position wasn’t proper, nothing about him and Arya was proper. But he was clouded with pain and he was still accepting that Arya was truly alive. Jon could geld him in the morning for all he cared, but Arya would only be separated from him by being pried out of his cold, dead hands.

The Maester nodded towards Lady Sansa and uncorked the bottle, Gendry shut his eyes, preparing for more fire to flare in his leg. When it didn’t come, he opened his eyes and looked down. Arya’s hand was covering the top of the bottle, studying his face. He gave her a jerk of his head, trying to tell her without words that it was okay, that it was necessary, if he didn’t want to risk losing his leg.

Arya released the Maester’s hand and Gendry took a deep breath. A few drops slid down his skin, burning, and his eyes screwed shut. Then Arya was there, chapped lips hungrily covering his, hands pulling his face towards hers. His arm crushed her small body to his.

Her lips were persistent, nipping his bottom lip until he gasped, her tongue slipping inside. Their tongues dancing, exploring each other. Arya tasted sweet, despite the carnage that had taken place around her, like sugared lemons. Distantly, Gendry realized that the only reason he knew what that tasted like was because of their night in his forge.

Gendry felt the sting of medicine on his leg but Arya pulled him closer, moving her mouth devouring his, not letting him truly feel the pain. He felt the wrapping of linen around his leg, holding his skin closed around the stitches, but he lost himself further into Arya. She was warm and soft and Arya. She pulled away from him, peppering loving kisses to his chin and cheeks and forehead.

“That should do it,” the Maester said as he knotted the wrappings on his leg. “May I look at your head now, My Lady?”

Arya rolled her eyes, blowing a chunk of hair away from her eyes, only to have it fall right back over. “Must you?”

“He must,” Gendry deadpanned. His tone making it obvious that he’s not to be trifled with on this topic. Gently he pushed her hair away from her face, exposing the crack on her forehead. “This doesn’t look good, love.”

With a heavy sigh, Arya relented and turned on his lap, letting the Maester clean her head. Gendry rubbed her back methodically, watching as she blinked at the uncomfortable feeling of having someone poking inside your skin. It wasn’t too deep but the Maester still sewed the skin shut, Gendry letting Arya crush his hand in her small ones as the needle slid through her skin. It left behind the yellow and green bruise over the right side of her face.

“How did you get that?” he asked quietly.

Arya’s thumb glides over his knuckles. “Hit a wall trying to get away from a mob.”

Gendry watched the Maester bow respectfully to Arya and return to the more gravely injured soldiers. Gendry felt guilty that he had taken the Maester away from men who were suffering from much more serious wounds. “Where were you? I couldn’t find you on the wall or in the courtyard. I thought- I thought you were dead, Ar.”

Her eyes softened and she kissed his cheek, imprinting an apology for worrying him into his skin. “I was on the wall,” Arya began. “When those things came crawling up, I fought, but there were too many of them. We were overrun.”

“Aye, I saw her take on a whole army of the monsters.” Davos sounded impressed and Gendry finally remembered that it wasn’t just Arya and him, her siblings were around them and Davos and Tormund.

“And then she killed the Night King,” Bran piped up with his usual monotone voice.

Everyone froze and stared at Arya in awe, she rolled her eyes. “He wasn’t so bright. I don’t know why you lot made it such a big deal, droning on and on about him being the greatest enemy we’ll ever face when all it took was one sneaky girl and a good hand with a knife.”

Jon shook his head and Tormund laughed loudly, startling the rest of the room. Arya glanced around almost nervously as people took notice to them after Bran’s reveal. They whispered amongst themselves, and Gendry could pick up the words ‘Kingslayer’ and ‘Lightbringer’ aimed at the woman sitting on his leg.

Arya bristled and stood up quickly, “I need some fresh air.”

She brushed past her siblings and jogged out the hall, disappearing through the filtering crowd, Arya moved past a group of men carrying in more bloodied people. She was gone for a few moments before Gendry felt the chill of Winterfell seeping into him again, the worry building back in his chest. Without a second thought, Gendry sat up to go after her, his leg flaring and shaking under him before Davos grabbed his arm to stop him from falling.

Jon glanced at the door his sister left through and back to the man she had been kissing. “If you hurt my little sister, there won’t be a rowboat within a hundred acres for you to escape from me and Ghost.”

Gendry would have been scared of the dark look in Jon’s eyes but he knew a she-wolf that was more terrifying. He shook his head, “If I hurt Arya, she’s more than capable of causing me unspeakable pain herself.”

He limped his way out of the hall, passing dead covering the courtyard in piles. Soldiers searched for more living and Gendry looked around the yard, his eyes traveling up the stairs and to the wall. There she was, leaning against the wall with her head thrown back and watching the sky as the first streaks of dawn broke through the night.

Gendry took the stairs slowly, stepping around a skeleton clutching a shard of broken and twisted steel in it’s boney fingers. Arya chuckled when Gendry kicked the skeleton off the wall. He stepped up next to her on the wall, leaning on the cold stone.

“I didn’t do it to be a hero,” Arya stared over the moors of Winterfell. “I did it to protect my family. Jon and Sansa and Bran.” Her fingers wove into his. “You.”

“I know, but you’re a hero, love.” Gendry pulled her into his chest, shivering when a gust of wind hit his back. “You ended the Long Night, the Night King and his army. You didn’t do it for glory or to have songs written for you, but you saved the whole world.”

“When I was in the hall and Beric died saving me, I didn’t care about the world. All I could see was Jon dead with Longclaw sticking out of his chest, Sansa beheaded at the steps of the Red Keep like our father, Bran laying in a crumpled mess at the bottom of that tower again, and you. All I could see was you but your eyes weren’t the bright blue I know, they were unnatural, electric blue. Like theirs.”

“Arya…”

“I didn’t do it to save the world. I did it to save the people I love.” her hands picked at the laces holding her leather jerkin closed and she yanked them open and pulled her tunic town to reveal five long blue lines burned into the tender skin of her neck. “He had me by the throat and I could feel him crushing the life out of me. But I didn’t care. I knew that if he was dead, it would mean you’re all safe.”

“Arya…” he tried to speak but his throat was dry and his words were muddled.

“He shattered into nothing and I could breathe again, but all I could think about was my family being dead. Me being too late to save them and all of them being dead, you being dead.” her lip quivered and her eyes watered. “I checked on Bran and I ran out of the Godswood and I found Sansa in those damned crypts, and then we found Jon and we went back to Bran and we were all together again,” Arya was panicked, reliving her search. “But I still couldn’t find you. I left them in the Godswood and I looked for you, I looked for you but I couldn’t find you.”

His fingers tentatively touched the edge of the dark bruises left by the hand of the Night King. They were deep and Gendry knew there would be scars from the icy burns on her pale skin. He was angry that Arya was hurt, he was furious that she could have died and he wouldn’t have known until he found her in the Godswood, in a heap on the ground with chunks of ice surrounding her. He couldn’t imagine that pain again, thinking her dead.

“It’s okay,” he pulled her to his chest, hugging her tightly.

“I couldn’t find you.” she whimpered into his chest and Gendry felt his heart squeeze. “I thought you were dead, you stupid bull.”

“You found me.” He rubbed his fingers over the nape of her neck. Arya breathed deeply into his jerkin. “And I’m never leaving again.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“Yes, I can.” Arya called him a stubborn bull for a reason and he was set to prove that she didn’t always have to win their arguments. “Winterfell isn’t so bad, it’s a little too cold for a bastard of Flea Bottom at night but if I stay close to the forge then I’ll be fine.”

“If you think I’m leaving you to live in the forge, you’re sorely mistaken.” Gendry’s heart stopped. He would fight tooth and nail to stay by her side for the rest of his life, but if she didn’t want him there, he would leave with a heavy heart. “There’s plenty of space in my rooms.”

He couldn’t help it, he started to laugh into the top of her head. She pulled her face away, her face flushed and she hit him. “I thought you were going to kick me out of the North.”

“I would never do that, you stupid!” Arya hugged him tighter. “You’re my family.”

Gendry kissed the crown of her head. “As you wish, milady.”

“Don’t call me milady, stupid!”

Arya lifted her head, her chin resting gently against his chest. Gendry’s forehead dropped to meet hers. Her hand was warm against his cheek and her steel coloured eyes fluttered shut, her nose brushing against his. Their lips met in a sweet kiss, gentle and loving. They met once, twice before Gendry dug his fingers into her hair, his lips sucking her bottom lip before plunging his tongue into her mouth. His arms wrapped around Arya’s waist, hands kneading her hips.

When they pulled apart, Arya smiled at him, her lips bruised from his kiss and Gendry felt like if he were to fall off the wall, he would sprout wings and fly.

**Author's Note:**

> Are you telling me that Arya, whose whole purpose in the show was to reunite with her family and stay with them, ends up sailing on her own? To a place no one has ever returned from so it's not an understatement to think she never sees her family again. Not Jon, not Sansa, not kind-of-Bran, not Gendry.
> 
> Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?
> 
> ~ “He wasn’t so bright. I don’t know why you lot made it such a big deal, droning on and on about him being the greatest enemy we’ll ever face when all it took was one sneaky girl and a good hand with a knife.” - me, yelling at D&D


End file.
